As I mentioned in channel last night, I still want to get some code done before starting the regular season but that doesn't mean we can't move on with the waiver draft and the Challenge Tournament. And any team swaps that come through, I suppose, though I think those would have happened already if we were going to get any.

Tentative schedule: Valid rosters due by 5:00 PM on Wednesday, January 16. Waiver draft at 7:00 PM on Thursday, January 17. Challenge Tournament starts on Monday, January 21. Challenges can be made starting now.

I just want to give a State of the League statement to cover a couple things from recent events.

First off, I want to start with some points that I said to Dave as he and I discussed his missing a draft pick in the Season 30 Entry Draft. For the sake of transparency, this is very nearly a copy and paste from my conversation with him.

My comment about how the league as a whole was never going to vote (not that it was put to a formal vote) to remove Dave was not meant to mean that I wanted to do so only for you all to shut me down. Simply that discussion was meaningless because if the league members wouldn't call for Al's removal (for example), of course they wouldn't call for Dave's. No matter who it is, the result of asking the league if a GM should be removed will always be no. So asking for your input was futile in that respect.

My dilemma is that I wrote the rules the way they are for a very specific reason, to keep things black and white. Only a few GMs are around from the first time that I had to remove a GM from the DFHL; when our former Quebec GM kept accusing me of playing favorites. I removed him because I wouldn't tolerate attacks on my character and - to prevent them in the future - I've attempted to make the rules as black and white as possible. The rules are that way to protect me and the integrity of the league.

So, as of right now, the rules say that Dave should be removed. I'm not doing that. I feel like, if he were paying attention, this opens me to up to accusations from Brass (who already has reason to dislike me due to how the NHA ended). He missed one required vote and was removed. Dave missed one required draft pick but gets to stay. And I think he'd be right.

He's probably not paying attention. Al probably isn't, either. Nor Skylar. This is _probably_ no big deal. But it puts me in a position that I don't like being in.

I used to ask for a vote of GMs to insulate myself from the decision entirely but that clearly wasn't working. So I switched to a set of black and white, "do this or your gone" rules, which everyone accepted until all the sudden nearly everyone didn't. It's incredibly frustrating to me.

That said, I'm going to keep trying to find a happy medium. I'm going to rewrite the rules to account for tenure while remaining black and white. I have some ideas but nothing I'm ready to share yet.

I'm in no rush to change those rules because another one of the things I need to keep in mind is that I always say "real life" is more important than the league but I never apply that myself. As such, I'm holding off on the start of Season 30 until I'm ready to move forward. It's not like I'm taking a vacation or anything, as really I just want to get some new code done before throwing more games into the system, but for me it's a matter of prioritizing rather than trying to do everything. Right now, I'm prioritizing the new code over more games.

I'll let everyone know when I have further updates but I'll probably be back to flying under the radar for a bit.

I've been thinking on this and I'm going to continue doing so, but the league deserves to know what's happening.

I should not have opened this up to debate. The minute I did so, the consensus was always going to be that we should give Dave another chance. _Every_ time we have ever discussed punishing a GM, the vote has been in favor of keeping him around. Al would still be in the league if I hadn't exercised executive privilege. So I shouldn't have bothered having a discussion about this.

The rules as they are currently defined were written for a version of the DFHL that doesn't exist anymore. I will be re-writing them and providing new punishments for inactivity - intentional or otherwise - that allow for leniency.

Dave is staying. His trading rights are suspended indefinitely. Additional action is still to come, I just haven't decided what it will be yet. While I admit that the rules as currently written are inflexible, he still broke them (again, intentionally or otherwise).

This week's valid roster deadline and the Waiver Draft are cancelled. They will be rescheduled sometime after the new year.

The Season 30 DFHL Entry Draft has completed, though it was not without its issues.

With the draft complete, valid rosters must be set by 5:00 PM on December 19. The Waiver Draft will take place on December 20 at 7:00 PM.

All rated, eligible players who were drafted should now be on their respective teams' rosters. Some of these players are eligible to be returned to the Property List so contact me if you want that taken care of.

In adding those players, I've found a bug in the code that assigns new player numbers. It seems that, if a player's current NHL number is not available, it will start with the lowest number currently assigned to a player on that team's roster and count up until it finds an open slot. So there may be numbers you want to change. This should happen with trades as well.

Additionally, pick #31 went unused by the Kansas City Scouts. As discussed in-channel during the draft, the league rulebook states that "Any general manager who does not ensure that his or her team's roster complies with all league rules by any given deadlines will automatically be removed, as will any general manager who fails to make a selection in the league's Entry Draft." As Dave is a longtime, generally-active GM, I'm allowing debate on whether or not that rule is written clearly and whether any leeway should be given. That said, the debate will need to be quick as, if we replace Dave, we'll probably need to reschedule the Waiver Draft.

Alright, with the league back to a full set of GMs, I suppose we're out of excuses to delay the Entry Draft. With the holidays and everything December is always a bit of a pain to work around, but we can probably find some dates that work. How about any of the following...

December 6, 8:00 PMDecember 10 or 11, 8:00 PMDecember 15 or 16, noon

All times Eastern, as per usual. This gives us a quick option and some afternoon options. If we go earlier in the month, we can probably even sneak in the waiver draft and get the season started before the 25th. If we go later, the waiver draft gets caught up in some of that, but we'll work with it.

As everyone can see, award voting is complete. Only one GM failed to vote without an excuse and, given the login issues over the last week, I'm not sure that shouldn't be written off as well.

Re-rates are also done, though feel free to let me know if anything looks wrong.

The next step this offseason is finding a replacement for outgoing Rangers GM Matt. Guido's friend Robert got half of his account set up and I've reached out to him about the rest but haven't heard anything back yet. If he's interested, that's taken care of. If not, we'll need to find someone.

I have a(nother) massive set of code updates that I would love to launch before moving on to the draft but I honestly can't tell how long it's going to take to finish. If it's a week, sure, no problem. If it's a month, that's probably not an issue. If we're talking three months (I hope not), it makes no sense to wait for that to be done before moving on. So I'm going to keep plugging away at it and we'll see where things stand by the time we've got our new GM in place.

On a related note, if anyone is looking to trade a goalie, let me know. :stuck_out_tongue:

With games completed, it's time for award voting to wrap up Season 29 and move on to Season 30. As per usual, voting is done through the GM Tools and is required. We'll call noon on Sunday the deadline for getting votes in. After that, we'll move on to re-rates and see if we need any new GMs and try to get Season 30 going pretty quickly.

Thanks to everyone for another great season and, again, congrats to Chris.